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After my dad died, we found the love letters

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Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#411

Post by Dylan16807 »

gritten wrote: post #362
gwd wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's judging people, and there's judging actions. - Getting married under societal pressure even when you're pretty sure you're gay: I'm willing to cut him some slack on this. - Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK, you've been placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation. - Telling a lover you want to be exclusive, and getting him to move to a completely new country,…

>Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK In what world is this ever "OK"?

It works better when you don't remove half the sentence.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#412

Post by jemmyw »

rosstex wrote: post #201
jemmyw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see why you should support that. In your case your wife is not closeted and living a lie, everything is out in the open. So deciding to change you for someone else, regardless of sex, is no different than if I decided to change my wife for another woman. We give stuff up to make a commitment to someone else. It doesn't always work out and I'm not saying people should stay together when they don't want…

"Prefer women" could be in a sexual context, romantic context, platonic, etc. and the commenter above didn't define it. I imagine it's hard enough for bisexual people to be asked if they're "living a lie" by having to choose a side.

They aren't choosing a side, they're choosing a person. Being bisexual surely just opens the field to more potential mates, but once you're with someone the same rules apply as to folks in any other relationship. And I don't want to sound too conservative - if you choose to be with someone and both agree to have an open relationship of some kind, or any other mutually agreed kind of thing, that's no-ones business but yourselves.

In this case though, they're saying their partner is pansexual - open to many kinds of sexual activities. And they're saying that they'd be accepting if their partner needed to go and do sexy stuff with someone else even though it'd cause them a lot of pain (that's my reading of it, not having a platonic friendship with someone else as you mentioned). I'm asking why? Having a different to hetrosexual appetite before going into a relationship shouldn't give you special rules once you're in one - it's absolutely no different than if a hetrosexual person wanted to sleep around. OK if your relationship allows for that, really not OK if it's going to cause your partner/spouse/love pain, as they said.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#413

Post by pyuser583 »

Thank you for this article.

You’ve censored out some names as “redacted” but it’s pretty easy to fill in at least one name by other articles in the site. If you want anonymity, consider doing a broad review.

I’m not trying to dox you - it’s totally up you what to share.

But some of the articles seem to be private, while others seem very public.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#414

Post by [deleted] »

tomhow wrote: post #348
ninetyninenine wrote: post #171

[flagged]

This is not an acceptable comment on HN. It's not OK to scold or harangue people like this here. The guidelines foremost ask us to "Be kind" in comments, and that isn't negated just because you disapprove of what the parent commenter has done. Further, we've had to ask you repeatedly to observe the guidelines and refrain from trolling. We have to ban accounts that continue to act this way. Please stop this if you wan…

[deleted]

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#415

Post by mierz00 »

nkrisc wrote: post #106
mierz00 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve come to love this style of writing. While not quite the same, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street felt similar. Just raw thoughts, no rules.

Capitalization would not change the content at all, but would make it easier to read. People reading English have expectations are capitalization. Breaking those expectations makes the text more difficult to read and feel less effortless.

It’s a stylistic choice, it doesn’t have to cater to peoples expectations.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#416

Post by tomhow »

miltonlost wrote: post #306
ninetyninenine wrote: post #171

[flagged]

Please go to therapy.

We banned that user's account, so we agree that it was a very bad comment, among multiple very bad comments from them. But please don't respond, even to very bad comments, with personal attacks. Just flag them and email us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can take the appropriate action.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#417

Post by tibbar »

arpinum wrote: post #12
pja wrote: post #4

> “He wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. His entire life, and mine as well.” What a burden of expectations to lay on both yourself & your own family. I’m glad the author was able to put those aside & live her own life more authentically than her father did.

The author may be unduly harsh on her father. He got to be publicly married and have a private gay life. He didn't have to live with his wife much. He liked the idea of having a daughter. Given the hand he was dealt it's a pretty good outcome for himself. Grossly selfish, but not a waste for himself.

Sometimes people use "waste" in the sense of "spent selfishly/frivolously." I enjoy evenings spent with prestige television and a tub of ice cream but, past a certain point, it's definitely a waste of time, especially if I have commitments to other people.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#418

Post by the_arun »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #87
pavlov wrote: post #75

Ouch. This hits incredibly hard. I’ve been this dad who sits frozen at the TV every evening. I had the affairs with the emotionally unavailable men, and became one myself. Before you judge the man in this story too harshly — and there’s certainly much to judge, especially given the follow-up post — consider the environment he and I grew up in. Being gay as a young teenager in the early 1990s could feel literally like…

I have heard this play out too many times. Most recently here, a college junior's wife revealed four months after marriage that she is actually a lesbian (she didn't share it – he caught her in their bedroom with a colleague of hers when he returned home early from the office), and he would be free to do what he wants; she should be too. Hit him hard, but he said they should go for an annulment— out of question; a di…

I didn't think he is a bad person. I felt he is not brave enough to take the challenge.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#419

Post by noduerme »

fransje26 wrote: post #312
noduerme wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of what you say, and while I thought the author was very good, I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. For the same reason that no one can ever know what's inside another person's mind, much less a child understand their parents.

> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. In the process of grieving, when the emotions are at their rawest, it is difficult to not have knee-jerk reactions to the emotions that are piling-up fast and strong. Except for that very slip, I actually found the piece impressively objective, level-headed, compassionate and open-minded.

Having taken some flak here for my reaction to that line, I'd clarify that I don't blame the writer for feeling that way. That's perfectly natural. My critique is that the injection of a summary opinion cheapened the writing and flattened the complexity. In a literary sense, the author was doing a great job of showing, rather telling the reader what to think, up to that point. The reader may very well have drawn the conclusion that the father was a coward. In a legal sense, the flash of bitterness actually harms their case. It draws into question their reliability as a witness. Calling it a "slip" was insightful, as it implies both.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#420

Post by throwaboat »

throwaway142351 wrote: post #59

I'm a dad too, and I'm in a somewhat similar situation. My son is under five, and it feels like I'm still at the very beginning of his story. I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path. It felt easier to stay closeted. Easier to date a woman. Easier to move in together, propose, get married, and even have a child than to face my truth. I lo…

I started writing a letter to my kids once a year. I store them in my email for now. I want them to know who I was.

I feel like the author of this post would have benefited from those letters. Maybe your kids would too.

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